Determinism

As indicated earlier, the history of philosophy up to the pressent moment has in it compatibilists, philosophers who say determinism is compatible with freedom and hence that determinism does not matter much. But the history also has in it incompatibilists, those who say determinism is incompatible with freedom and hence determinism matters a lot. Both of these regiments of philosophers can make a case.

Who do you yourself think is not free?

One good answer, or a start on a good answer, is a man in handcuffs. Another is a man in jail. There is also the woman facing a man with a gun or a knife who has to do what he says. There is also a whole people or nation who cannot run their own affairs because a foreign army has invaded and is in control. Then there is somebody who is not subject to actual physical constraints—handcuffs or prison bars or to threats or coercion by other people—but is the victim of an inner psychological compulsion. It is very natural to include as unfree at least some drug addicts and also a woman who has to wash her hands about forty times a day. Probably you will also say someone is unfree who is argued into some conclusion or into doing something that goes against his or her whole personality.

The central thought is that freedom is an absence of coercion or constraints. Or to put it positively, freedom is an ability to decide and do what one wants. Freedom is being able to decide and act in accordance with one's own desires, not something conflicting with them. Maybe this idea of freedom as voluntariness, as one can call it, can be enlarged in various ways. Thinking of the drug addict, can one allow that he or she wants the heroin, but he or she is unfree in that he or she does not want to be the victim of that desire for heroin?

This voluntariness, if one thinks about it, is perfectly consistent with determinism. This kind of freedom can certainly exist—lots of it—even if determinism is absolutely true. What this amounts to is that this kind of freedom is not an absence of cause and effect but rather is a matter of a certain kind of effects. One is free in this sense, so to speak, when one's decisions and actions are owed to one, come from causes that are one's own desires or certain of one's desires, not from causes that are against one's desires.

One can also see that this kind of freedom goes with a kind of moral responsibility for what one does. If the cause of the disaster is in me, so to speak, then I am responsible for the disaster. Furthermore, if you want to reduce future disasters, I am the one to disapprove of or blame or put in jail.

So that is compatibilism, the idea that determinism is no threat at all to freedom. But it is certainly not the only way of thinking about these things. Ask that question again.

Who do you think is not free?

The best general answer, probably, is that it is somebody who does not have to do what he or she does. But does not that obviously mean that he or she is left room for choice, that he or she has different possibilities in front of him or her, that he or she can do otherwise than he or she does? And to come to the crucial bit, the crunch, does that not mean that he or she is not caused or necessitated to do what he or she does?

If that is not completely obvious, think of somebody who is really subject to determinism when he or she is unfaithful to his or her partner—say when he or she decides to dial a telephone number. If determinism is true, the dialing had to happen because of certain causes, and those causes had to happen because of still earlier ones, and so on back—say to before the person was born. The dialing could only be up to the person in question if those causes before he or she was born were up to him or her, which is impossible.

So, very differently, if somebody is free and responsible in dialing a telephone number, that must be something that is just inconsistent with determinism. It must be that the dialing is not just an effect or rather that it is owed to something that is not just an effect. It must be owed to an act of will. It must come from what philosophers call origination—very roughly, causing something without being caused to do it and thus being responsible for it in a special way.